The Turn from “What” to “How”: Garfinkel's Reach Beyond Description

John Heritage described Harold Garfinkel's central question as “how do social actors come to know, and know in common what they are doing and the circumstances in which they are doing it.” The case of Agnes illuminates the methods by which members produce intelligible actions and recognizable—even “natural”—gender orderliness. With this central interest as a starting point, this article offers some observations about transgender women in prison and their creative adaptation to life behind bars.     

“His” and “her” marriage expectations: Determinants and consequences

This article uses couple‐level data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N= 2,263) to investigate factors associated with unmarried parents’ expectations about marriage and the association between their expectations and subsequent union transitions. In most couples, both partners expect to marry, and their shared expectations are the strongest predictor of marriage and separation following their child's birth. Although men's expectations are somewhat more consequential for union transitions, marriage and relationship stability are more likely when at least one parent expects to marry. Factors such as children from previous relationships, distrust, conflict, and shared activities are also associated with union transitions. Findings about how expectations and other factors relate to marriage and separation may inform new marriage promotion initiatives.     

“Whistleblower” or “Renegade”: Definitional Contests in an Official Inquiry

This paper addresses the interpretive dynamics of official inquiries. Beginning with an ideal-typical sketch of congressional investigations, the discussion traces a portrayal of public problems by a committee of the House of Representatives. This leads to the analysis of a hearing in which committee factions struggled to define an Air Force administrator as a “whistleblower” or a “renegade.” The hearing is understood as a “certification ceremony” that rhetorically transformed staff discoveries into allegedly definitive evidence. It is concluded that the paper's conceptual approach can be applied to diverse inquiries that combine documentary research with interrogation of witnesses to generate authoritative findings.     

Narrating Nursing Jurisdiction: “Atrocity Stories” and “Boundary‐Work”

Sociologists have long recognized that the division of labor is, at its root, a process of social interaction. Although “negotiations” figure centrally in symbolic interactionist studies of work, relatively little attention has been given to the ways in which the structure of workplace talk contributes to the social constitution of occupations. Drawing on the insights of discourse and conversation analysis, this article examines occupational atrocity stories and considers how they accomplish boundary‐work in the hospital setting. I focus on the stories British nurses told about doctors and use data generated in ethnographic research into the routine accomplishment of nursing jurisdiction. I conclude with some general observations about how the detailed analysis of stories and storytelling can contribute to the wider study of social group formation.     

Between “Families in Trouble” and “Children at Risk”: Historicising “Troubled Family” Policy in England since 1945

The launch of the Troubled Families Programme in 2011 has thrown into sharp relief how governments develop policies and practices to intervene in the lives of so‐called ‘troubled families’. Commentators were quick to make comparisons with historic efforts to rehabilitate ‘problem families’ in the post‐war period. However, beyond discursive similarities, there are also marked continuities in how family policies have been developed and implemented. This review narrates the rise, fall and rise of concern about ‘problem’ and ‘troubled’ families in England in the context of anxieties about child and family welfare, and the appropriate response of the state.     

“Revenge” and “Rescue”: Workplace Deviance in the Taxicab Industry*

This study explores taxicab drivers’ acts of “revenge” and “rescue,” some of which are expressive acts, while others are more instrumental. This article builds on earlier theories of workplace deviance, demonstrating how deviance can serve different purposes and expanding the concept of “deviance admiration” ( Heckert and Heckert 2004 ). It examines deviance in a circumstance—the taxicab industry—which introduces a tension between mandated conformity and necessary deviance: employees must conform to the employers’ rules and yet, to accomplish their jobs well, they need to abandon those rules occasionally. In addition to its theoretical contributions, this work has important practical applications for managers.     

“We have to take these guys out”: Motivations for Assaulting Incarcerated Child Molesters

We know very little about how incarcerated men justify assaults against at‐risk inmates such as child molesters. For this article, we fill this gap in the literature by examining how men describe these assaults as a way to align their own violent behavior with more conventional mores. We find that formerly incarcerated men justify violence as a way to raise their own social status and promote cultural norms against child abuse. When inmates attack someone convicted of child molestation, they do so to punish him and provide a “service” to their community. Furthermore, they elevate their own social status and distance themselves from these offenders. Theoretically, this work broadens our understanding of verbal justifications for violent action.     

“I Amn Not a Utistivc on Thje Typ” (“I'm Not Autistic on the Typewriter”)

Facilitated communication involves hand-over-hand or hand-on-forearm support of students as they communicate through pointing at pictures, letters or other objects. Over time, it is expected that the hand and arm support can be faded back. This observational study describes an effort to introduce facilitated communication to 22 students, ranging in age from 3 years 10 months to 21 years, in several US public schools. The students are all labeled autistic and do not speak or speak only with echolalic phrases. The findings include observations of the students communicating with facilitation, language samples, and conversations by the students. The students reveal unexpected literacy and numeracy skills. The appearance of these abilities raises a number of questions concerning prior assumptions about autism, communication, independence and interdependence, and the education of students with and without disabilities.     

“Control frauds” as financial super-predators: How “pathogens” make financial markets inefficient

White-collar criminology scholarship shows that “control frauds” (frauds led by the CEO) use accounting fraud to deceive (or suborn) sophisticated financial market participants. Large control frauds cause greater financial losses than all other forms of property crimes combined. Weak regulation, supervision and ethics produce epidemics of control fraud that cause systemic economic damage. As with the natural world, these financial super-predators act like pathogens that take over a firm and act as a “vector” to cause ever greater damage. Control fraud theory poses a major challenge to the efficient markets hypothesis and the resulting praxis that devalues financial regulation.     

“FOI POR ACASO”*:

Everyone knows that most of the things that happen to them happen “by accident,” and this is particularly true of the things that are most important to us, like our choice of a career or a mate. Yet social science theory looks for determinate causal relationships, which do not give an adequate account of this thing that “everyone knows.” If we take the idea of “it happened by chance” seriously, we need a quite different kind of research and theory than we are accustomed to.